Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:01:02 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:01:02] S1: Boy, did I start creating agents? So now we have Polly, Finn, Max, Howie, Kelly, Holly. Sam is my salesperson. What Sam does has real economic value. Last year before the beginning of the year, I was paying somebody 10 hours a week to do this. [00:01:22] S0: Today, my guest is Claire Vo, the incredible host of our sister podcast, How I AI. She's also a longtime engineer, a three-time chief product officer and founder of her own AI startup. This is our first ever crossover episode. We may do more. I asked Claire to come on the podcast because she has become an absolute power user of OpenClaw, which is especially surprising because she was one of the biggest skeptics when it first came out. I don't want to give too much away, but she has got nine Open Claws running across three computers, and maybe most importantly, unlike a lot of people online talking about OpenClaw, it has really truly changed her life across her family's life, her home life, and her work life. Claire is very pragmatic and practical. It takes a lot to get her excited. She's told me that OpenClaw is the most mind-blowing and important AI experience she has had since ChatGPT, which for Claire, who tries out every new AI product, says a lot. [00:05:07] S1: I know, I was going to say, we've been a year into the How I AI podcast journey, and this is the crossover hit everybody's been waiting for, Lenny and Claire back together again. [00:05:16] S0: I've been waiting. What does it feel like being on the other side of the mic now that you're a fancy podcast host yourself?
00:05:16 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:05:16] S0: I've been waiting. What does it feel like being on the other side of the mic now that you're a fancy podcast host yourself? [00:05:22] S1: I mean, we had some technical issues before we started recording, so I don't know how fancy I am. It's really fun. What I appreciate about you, and what you've taught me is, you're really great at putting guests at ease, and making this feel like a fun conversation with a friend, with a colleague, with somebody you respect. So I find both sides of the camera very fun. [00:05:43] S0: I love that. And what I tell a guest is that I'm kind of a reverse journalist. I want you to be the best version of yourself, not catch you off guard. And the goal is to have fun. Here, I'll show this thing that I share every guest before we start. Here's my rule. Goal number one, have fun and breathe. [00:05:58] S1: It's really hard for me not to be having fun. I'm working so much and doing so much, but that's really not because I'm chasing some productivity metric or feel like I need to ship more because I can. It's because all of it feels very fun. I think vibe coding is gaming right now. I haven't felt like this since I was a teenager learning to code, and playing video games and all this kind of stuff. So it comes from a very joyous, creative place for me, not stressful.
00:05:58 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:05:58] S1: It's really hard for me not to be having fun. I'm working so much and doing so much, but that's really not because I'm chasing some productivity metric or feel like I need to ship more because I can. It's because all of it feels very fun. I think vibe coding is gaming right now. I haven't felt like this since I was a teenager learning to code, and playing video games and all this kind of stuff. So it comes from a very joyous, creative place for me, not stressful. [00:06:28] S0: I feel like there's a whole other podcast we should do of just how you do all that you do. I don't know if people know all this. You have three kids. You have a podcast, weekly podcast. You have ChatPRD, a product company you're building. And I think there's something else even. [00:06:42] S1: Yeah. I just launched a course with my friend, Zach. And then my husband and I work on stuff. We invest. There's a lot going on right now. [00:06:51] S0: Okay. Well, maybe what's one tip that allows you to do this because this feels impossible. I have one kid. I don't know how you do this.
00:06:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:06:51] S0: Okay. Well, maybe what's one tip that allows you to do this because this feels impossible. I have one kid. I don't know how you do this. [00:06:57] S1: Well, I mean, marry good. That's what I got. Get a great co-parent, great partner. My husband is so supportive of all the things that I want to do, is an equal partner and more in the house stuff, and in the professional stuff. And that makes things a lot easier, when everybody in the household's pulling their weight. The second thing is what we just said, which is time flies when you're having fun. If the things that you center your work life around are things that you would find natural joy in anyway, it's very easy to spend the time and effort and dedication to do it. And then we'll go into this, which is I just spend more time automating the things that I do than doing them. And I take a lot of notice of the things that I'm avoiding. And when I avoid them, they either don't serve my ultimate purpose, and I need to let them go and not do them as part of my career, or I need to find a way to automate them and use some system to do it so I don't have to.
00:08:01 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:08:01] S0: An amazing segue to what we're going to be actually talking about today. So we're going to be going deep, deep, deep on OpenClaw. And why I'm excited about this timing on this, it feels like the hype cycle, like the peak hype cycle of OpenClaw has passed. And now, instead of all these just videos and posts coming out of just these breathless OpenClaw's going to change your life, install it. It's the best thing that's ever happened. It feels like we're getting now to just like, what is it actually useful for? Here's to actually use it in your life. It's been very fun to watch your journey with OpenClaw. You started off as one of the leading skeptics. You had these videos where you're just like, it just deleted my whole calendar, and it's joining my podcast. I don't even know how to get it. You're recording and it joined your podcast. And now you're a true believer, from what I can tell. To give people just a glimpse of that, how many claws do you have running right now? How many computers do you have?
00:08:52 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:08:52] S1: Yeah, I have three Mac Minis over there unboxed. Literally just unboxed one. I have another one, boxed, upstairs. I had Polly originally running on an old MacBook Air, but she got a brain transplant into a stack of Mac Minis and I'm now running eight different agents on OpenClaw. And I definitely started... I'm just so anti-hype cycle sometimes, and it doesn't come from trying to be contradictory or take a weird stance in the discourse. What it really comes from is, I show up to How I AI, show up to public, and I give you my honest opinion about where these products are now, and my personal experience as someone who doesn't claim to be an expert in every single technology, but is technically proficient enough to knock my way around a harness. And when I first heard about OpenClaw, there was enough noise around it. I thought, "It's my job to find out what this is all about." And my first install, I truly spent eight hours that first day getting OpenClaw up and running. And in return, for those eight hours, I got my personal family calendar deleted by OpenClaw. It was very thrilling. It was very, very fun. [00:10:13] S0: Great ROI.